The correct place of a verb in a sentence
What you need to know:
- Where it is placed in the sub-editor’s caption, the adverb yesterday can modify or qualify only the words “…radicalisation in the county…” — which, in the context, is utter nonsense. And let me reiterate this.
As we all should know, a verb is foremost among other parts of speech that an adverb can describe or modify.
Take the sentence “Kenya’s population increases rapidly”. Here the adverb rapidly is so juxtaposed to the verb increases (which it describes) that no learner with any aptitude for language is likely to mistake it.
That is the whole point. In any sentence, an adverb must be as close as possible to the verb that it qualifies. Yet take the following caption: “A section of Mombasa women joined by Nominated Senator Emma Mbura … march along Nkrumah Road … in support of dialogue with the youths initiative to end radicalisation in the county yesterday.”
I culled that fascinating piece of information from page 10 of the January 16 number of the Daily Nation. I place three dots between the noun “Road” and the preposition “in” to indicate that I have elided a great many other words from the statement “along Nkrumah Road … in support of dialogue with the youths initiative to end radicalisation in the county”.
But what interests us here is the way the adverb yesterday has been used. The word march is the conjugated verb. But the question is stark: How can “yesterday” (an adverb of time) modify that verb when all of 20 other words (which include another verb or two) have been intruded between the first verb and the adverb that corresponds to it?
Where it is placed in the sub-editor’s caption, the adverb yesterday can modify or qualify only the words “…radicalisation in the county…” — which, in the context, is utter nonsense. And let me reiterate this.
By positioning the adverb “yesterday” at the end of that sentence, the caption’s writer — and the sub-editor who passed it — have told the reader something quite other than what the writer had intended.
According to them, what had taken place “yesterday” was “…radicalisation in the county…”, not the demo along Mombasa’s Nkrumah Road. Thus the question when — which is what is answered here by the adverb yesterday — is among the several important “Ws” that make journalism tick.
That is why all the “W” questions of journalism must be answered near the summit of the inverted pyramidal shape of every news item. The other Ws include who was or were involved, where the event occurred and how things turned out.
The importance of each following “W” question can be likened to each stage of the real pyramid when it is inverted to taper downwards. Pundits grade each bit of information that follows concomitantly with the gradual loss of socio-intellectual significance as the pyramid of real information “tapers” downwards.
The bunching of all the “Ws” near the apex of the news pyramid is the reason the hierarchy of a journalistic piece is described as “inverted”.
For — unlike the upwards tapering of the ziggurats and pyramids of ancient Babylon and Egypt, the pyramid of journalistic information always tapers downwards. It is is always “top-heavy” and “bottom-thin” with information.
